The Director

By: David Ignatius

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 13 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

In David Ignatius' gripping new novel, spies don' t bother to steal information...they change it, permanently and invisibly. Graham Weber has been director of the CIA for less than a week when a Swiss kid in a dirty T-shirt walks into the American consulate in Hamburg and says the agency has been hacked, and he has a list of agents' names to prove it. This is the moment a CIA director most dreads. Weber isn' t sure where to turn until he meets a charismatic (and unstable) young man named James Morris who runs the Internet Operations Center. He' s the CIA' s in-house geek. Weber launches Morris on a mole hunt unlike anything in spy fiction - one that takes the listener into the hacker underground of Europe and America and ends up in a landscape of paranoia and betrayal. Like the new world of cyber-espionage from which it' s drawn, The Director is a maze of deception and double-dealing - about a world where everything is written in zeroes and ones and nothing can be trusted.

©2014 David Ignatius (P)2014 Recorded Books

Stick with it!

Took a while to get into but worth it. Drawn out in places but overall excellent.

Almost...

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

I did recommend it, before finishing the story, now not so much. Love the details offered up about cyber criminals going after corrupt officials but then the end came and the story just went 'poof' into the ether.

Which character – as performed by George Guidall – was your favorite?

George Guidall is always brilliant...any character he does comes to life.

Do you think The Director needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

No. It needs a rewrite.

Good Underplot; terrible main story

This book is not for most people. The plot is not terribly good and the storyline goes far afield. The underplot however is all about contemporary hackers and what they can do and how they break into secure data. The best I can compare it to is some of the very different kind of people I worked with 30+ years ago who, even then, marched to their own drummer. Every computer organization had one or two of these very bright "go-to" guys; even IBM which demanded white shirts of its public people but their back-office genius folks could do as they wanted. I am certain that remains true to this day.

Hi tech plot

Kept me turning pages. to see next twist ot turn. Great performance by Guid al.

Excellent Gripping Story on the Modern CIA

What made the experience of listening to The Director the most enjoyable?

The combination of Ignatius' suspenseful writing and the steady flawless reading by Guidall make this one of the best listens I've encountered.

Enjoyed the story.

If you like spy stories with a touch on technology, you would enjoy this book.

This was a bit of a slow burn for me

Not a book of extreme highs and lows, but definitely engaging throughput. Narrator’s pacing kept me engaged when things felt a little slow. All in al, l I felt this was a solidly enjoyable experience.

fairly good story

This is a mildly interesting story w too much details & not much action. It took a long time to get thru it

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

Conspiracy theories are a jaded genre of fiction. The Director is marginally interesting because of Assange’s WikeLeaks, and Snowden’s NSA’ fiasco.

The Director fails as a conspiracy theory thriller but succeeds in scaring anyone that believes in freedom (which does not infringe on others), and the right to privacy. If 50% of what Ignatius suggests cyber criminals are capable of is true, no economy; no government agency; no private individual is safe.

Ignatius writes a story that suggests no security system exists that is not crack-able by a good hacker that understands computer coding and the gullibility of human beings. Ignatius infers–a good hacker with social engineering skill can crack any security system that is dependent on 1s and 0s. As a conspiracy theory story, The Director is boring and predictable but, as an exposé of cyber-crime, it is frightening.

Outstanding

Very well done. Super story narrated by the absolute best-Guidall. This is realistic enough to scare anybody. Great novel .